Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday October 04, 2010 @09:51PM
from the try-the-clarke-kubrick-corridor dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency is celebrating World Space Week (4-10 October 2010) with the release of 'The Space Game,' an online game for interplanetary trajectory design. The Space Game is an online crowdsourcing experiment where you are given the role of a mission designer to seek the best path to travel through space. The interactive game, coded in HTML5, challenges the players to devise fuel-efficient trajectories to various bodies of the Solar System via a user-friendly interface. The aim of the experiment is get people from all ages and backgrounds to come up with better strategies that can help improve the effectiveness of the current computer algorithms. As part of the events organized worldwide for Space Week, the first problem of the game is to reach Jupiter with the lowest amount of propellant. The best scores by 10 October will be displayed on the Advanced Concepts Team website and the three best designs will also receive some ESA prizes."

I, too, was boggled by whether they meant fuel-efficiency, as previously stated in the article, or if this was a contest to find out who could design the most pointless trajectory. Will this puzzle ever be solved???

The first launch needs to terminate with significant mass at many miles per second in Washington D.C. prior to the Jupiter launch in order to prevent the whole Jupiter project being killed halfway through planning.